Date: February 09, 2009
Time: 12:00 PM
Location: Dorothy Somerset Studios, Rm 110, 6361 University Boulevard
Undergraduate exhibition. Closing reception, Friday February 13, 4 pm – 7 pm
An exhibition of works by: Alicia Munro, Kevin Murphy, Julia Higgs, Jaylene McDonald, Leah Perry, Mike Macri, Jodie Mak, Jessica Delisle & Robin McNulty, Perrin Grauer and Jeff Chang.
What kinds of approaches to art making and intellectual engagement should a BFA programme offer students today?
This exhibition of 3rd and 4th-year student artworks provides a sample of the kind of interdisciplinary, intellectual, and material approaches that the visual arts side of the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at UBC encourages in its students. Rather than a strict medium-specific approach to making art, courses give students the opportunity to combine technical skill and understanding of materials with experimentation across media.
While disparate, the artworks in this exhibition reflect a materially and theoretically informed art practice, as much in cultural theory, art history, socio-political and environmental issues, as in contemporary art strategies. These works also privilege process and collaboration over the romantic notion of solo studio production.
Here one discerns a departmental vision that is critical of the art market, yet unimpeded by the veneer of conceptual strictures, advocating instead a sensitivity to materials (whether “traditional”, craft, or digital forms), to how the body performs, and to the transformative potential of art processes through experimental play and intellectual inquiry.
Marina Roy
